{"id":2149,"date":"2025-07-10T14:02:43","date_gmt":"2025-07-10T20:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/?p=2149"},"modified":"2025-07-10T14:02:43","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T20:02:43","slug":"power-apps-one-option-for-extending-m365","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.idubbs.com\/blog\/2025\/power-apps-one-option-for-extending-m365\/","title":{"rendered":"Power Apps &#8230; *One* Option for Extending M365"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This note is in response to Andrew Connell and Julie Turner&#8217;s YouTube video &#8211; &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VfiMG_9d8qc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Ep. 009 | Microsoft 365 Extensibility: Power Platform isn&#8217;t the Only Option<\/a>&#8221; &#8211; on their &#8220;Code. Deploy. Go Live.&#8221; YouTube channel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The premise of their episode title and some of the take-aways that struck Andrew and Julie were:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>&#8220;Power Platform is still king&#8221; &#8211; Julie&#8217;s observation while working the Ask the Experts table\/panel and seeing the line &#8211; the demand &#8211; for Power Platform Q&amp;A. <\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;The number of people that think that the way to build something custom on M365 &#8211; that your only option is Power Platform.&#8221; &#8211; Andrew&#8217;s observation after Seattle&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/techcon365.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">TechCon<\/a> event. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don&#8217;t necessarily disagree with these observations. Many folks that have dug into the Power Platform are invested&#8230; Power Apps and Power Automate have become their &#8220;hammer&#8221;, their tools of choice, their platform of preference and bias &#8211; both the community and marketing Microsoft has built around these tools does little to discourage that thinking. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Awareness<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I don&#8217;t know if folks aren&#8217;t aware of other methods to customize M365, or if they simply aren&#8217;t driven to find or investigate other options. For many of these folks &#8211; folks in the Power Platform&#8217;s target audience &#8211; &#8220;development&#8221;, &#8220;pro-code&#8221;, etc. is a no-go. Many are business users that have little interest in becoming developers and shy away from conversations about actual coding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As for me, while I focus on a range between out-of-box capabilities for power users of M365 through Power Apps makers, I try to include the full range of options available for folks in the conversation: from out of box capabilities, to tools like Power Platform that extend traditional platform capabilities, to pro-dev customizations. 3rd party products also figure in the mix and also change at a rate challenging to keep up with.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Power Platform is <em>accessible<\/em> <\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;m not sure &#8220;accessible&#8221; is the right word&#8230; but for many M365 users the step up to Power Apps and Power Automate is a lot more approachable, achievable, reachable, and viable than stepping into the &#8220;pro-dev&#8221; development world. Mostly from a skills perspective. They can start experimenting with *some* Power Apps and Flows with very little effort and see results. Now, I understand that getting bigger results with Power Platform requires an investment of time and effort to do more advanced things. If someone were to compare efforts at becoming a high-level Power App maker with the effort to become an effective pro-developer resource&#8230; I&#8217;m not sure what that might look like. I am confident that most Power Apps folks would still choose Power Apps. Digging into the reasons for that would be interesting&#8230;   <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For a lot of folks, there&#8217;s a bit of disillusionment with IT and development. Developers are almost always overworked and have huge backlogs of work (new or maintenance) to keep them busy &#8211; making new requests hard to deliver on a timely basis. With that, lots of folks see opportunity with Power Apps as a way to get what they need from a business standpoint more quickly and easily. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yes, those of us on the IT side know choosing that path comes with a price. But folks trying to get their jobs done will still do it and deal with the &#8220;other stuff&#8221; later. Often with the blessing of their (non-IT) managers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Some organizations don&#8217;t have developers available in-house, so they need to engage with consultants &#8211; which cost money. These (usually) small to medium (&#8220;SMB&#8221;) organizations often resort to seeing how much they can get done with the tools and licensing they have available &#8211; which leads them to the Power Platform. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">&#8220;Not Enterprise-Ready&#8221;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Most of the folks I work with are at the intro-level of Power Apps, where I&#8217;m making folks aware of what&#8217;s available within existing M365 licensing. While I&#8217;ve seen some larger implementations, I don&#8217;t (IMO) have enough experience there to say where the Power Platform may falter in enterprise-level implementations &#8211; specifically when it comes to the limitations of the platforms. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I do know is that there is plenty of room for error in governance &#8211; both in planning and implementation. Most every pro-dev shop will enforce some level of application lifecycle management &#8211; or &#8220;ALM&#8221;. In short, this means they develop in an environment separate from the production data and functionality. While there are ways to implement ALM features with the Power Platform, it would be interesting to see stats on how many orgs that use Power Apps and flows are implementing ALM. Without ALM, they&#8217;re introducing risk to their environments. Risk to data. Risk to processes that can grow into business-critical levels. And more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are more Power Platform for M365 is &#8220;not ready&#8221; topics, but ALM is one of them. <br>I&#8217;d quickly add <strong>data <\/strong>to that list&#8230; where you choose to manage your data is important as solutions grow. Microsoft Lists and SharePoint Lists (the same thing) are wonderful tools for business users but have limitations and cede to Dataverse or SQL as they need to scale over time.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Final Thoughts&#8230; for now<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">*Some* of the perceptions above are biased by the conference&#8217;s target audience. I think we&#8217;ve been seeing fewer Developer attendees and more Power Platform folks. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Power Apps have their place in the maker\/development\/customization space. What role it plays, where triggers exist for review, migration, or other will vary from organization to organization. In an ideal world Power Platform tools are introduced to an environment in <em>partnership<\/em> with Pro-devs. ALM for Power Apps and flows are modeled on Pro-dev processes, and more. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think Power Apps are a great way to extend List functionality &#8211; both with forms and data presentation. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think it&#8217;d be great to see some Pro-Dev comparisons to each of the tools in the Power Platform space. Come up with some common scenarios where Power Apps, Flows, BI or other are implemented and discuss the efforts and capabilities of either approach&#8230; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It&#8217;s also important to get the &#8220;there are multiple approaches to customizations&#8221; conversation to decision makers &#8211; often the folks NOT at conferences. (generalization, not the rule&#8230;)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There are a lot of threads here that could be pulled&#8230; Lots to talk about. And lots of &#8220;it depends&#8221;.  \ud83d\ude42  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">&#8230; and we haven&#8217;t even touched how\/where the D365 community differs from the M365 community and Power Platform&#8217;s piece of <em>that <\/em>conversation&#8230;  <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This note is in response to Andrew Connell and Julie Turner&#8217;s YouTube video &#8211; &#8220;Ep. 009 | Microsoft 365 Extensibility: Power Platform isn&#8217;t the Only Option&#8221; &#8211; on their &#8220;Code. 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